But it has yet to discover a treatment for foot orgasms.

Drunk fish aren't nearly as afraid of robots. Typically, researchers who want to study anxiety need to be cruel to rodents. An average anxiety experiment will involve training the mice or rats to associate a sound with an electrical shock. If, for some reason, you wanted to use fish as your study system instead, this wouldn't work especially well for purely practical reasons (namely, moving your fish to a tank where you're able to give it a shock would probably be anxiety-inducing on its own). So, when an international team of researchers decided they wanted to make their zebrafish anxious, they came up with an alternative approach: robots.

They built robotic versions of the fish's natural predators, a heron and a larger fish, and then set them after the real fish. The robotic predatory fish appeared to be very effective and caused the zebrafish to seek shelter. The researchers then confirmed that everyone's favorite anxiety self-medication—alcohol—worked on the fish, as well.

An unexpected consequence of injury: orgasmic foot. It's hard to even begin to imagine the conversation that brought this woman to her doctor's attention, given the nature of her complaint: sensations in her left foot were giving her orgasms, and she wanted it to stop. As the authors of a paper on this condition note, "Spontaneous orgasm triggered from inside the foot has so far not been reported in medical literature." But, since she wanted them to stop, the doctors naturally responded by hooking up a few wires and giving her even more orgasms. They found that a heavy dose of anesthetic to the right area near the spine blocked both her genital and foot-based orgasms, leading them to conclude that an injury in the woman's past had literally led to some nerves getting crossed during the healing process.

Bonus Weird Science points for the Journal of Sexual Medicine, where this paper is published, for surrounding the article's abstract with Viagra ads.

Psychopaths have feelings, but only if they're told to. Apparently, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience has a deal set up with the local prison, so that people who normally wouldn't be let out can be brought in for brain scans. In the latest paper to result from this collaboration, the researchers focused on psychopaths, who have been traditionally viewed as lacking empathy. And, left on their own, this characterization seemed to fit: when viewing movies with emotional scenes, the psychopaths' brains were relatively quiet compared to controls' brains. But when the researchers asked the psychopaths to put themselves in the actors' shoes, most of this difference went away. So, psychopaths can experience empathy; they just don't do so by default.

Could you beat a prisoner in the Prisoner's Dilemma? Back to prison we go, both metaphorically and actually. Metaphorically, the "prisoner's dilemma" is a way to study human cooperation and competition using game theory. The basic structure of the dilemma is that, on average, things work out best if the players cooperate, but there can be big winners and losers if they don't. But there's a serious gap in the scientific literature here: nobody had ever checked how prisoners behave in the prisoner's dilemma. As it turns out, when placed in the classic prisoner's dilemma, real-life prisoners were actually more cooperative than college students.

To get a good night's sleep, go camping. Modern life simply makes it harder to sleep. That's the conclusion of some researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who note that the problem isn't simply that electricity means we're exposed to bright light after sunset; we spend less of the day being exposed to sunlight as well. All of this messes with the body's internal circadian clock. So, the team found a distinctly Boulder-style solution: take people camping. They found that a few days outdoors quickly reset everyone's clocks to a natural rhythm that was synchronized to the summer's sunrise and sunset.

Promoted Comments

Editor here: I wrote the caption and used the name of a childhood friend's fish. Perhaps for the purposes of a backstory here, we can say that Flipper's parents gave him an aspirational name, sort of like naming a human child after someone famous or calling them Doctor or Queeny. Flipper couldn't take the pressure though, and look where he ended up.

He tried to drown his feelings of gillt with booze. Sadly he dropped out of school, became a drifter, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly until the tide turned and he was left high and dry. A cautionary tail.